Kathryn Britton, MAPP '06, former software engineer, is a coach working with professionals to increase well-being, energy, and meaning
(Theano Coaching LLC). She teaches positive workplace concepts at the University of Maryland.
She recently published a book,Smarts and Stamina, on
using positive psychology principles to build strong health habits. Her blog is
Positive Psychology Reflections. Full bio.
Kathryn's articles
are here.

What can we do about things that we do not like about our jobs? How can Positive Psychology help us be both realistic and optimistic at the same time? This is the second in a series about turning work into a source of great satisfaction, meaning, and engagement. I base my thoughts on both academic study during the MAPP program and on my experiences with friends, individual clients, and organizations ranging from 10 to 100 people.

Moving away from Learned Helplessness

Taking Positive Psychology to work means being realistic about what is going on and then taking charge of what one can control – in particular one’s own response. It does not mean glossing over the negative and pretending it does not exist.

Practically every profession or job has something for people to feel unhappy about. As Peter Minich describes in an earlier article, many clinicians feel that their hands are tied by managed care. People in information technology fields fear layoffs because they see jobs like their own going to less expensive work forces in other countries. Teachers are weighed down by paperwork and often feel that new initiatives layered on top of old ones make it difficult to be there for children. Corporations are changing pension plans and health insurance benefits. Bureaucracy, work force movements, and economic pressures aren’t going away. So what do we do about them?

The path of least resistance is to complain. People get together to vent. But collective complaining, once it goes past clarifying the reality of the situation, can start a downward spiral that makes people feel more and more helpless. The concept of Learned Helplessness came at least partially out of experiments where Martin Seligman moved dogs from a cage where they could do nothing about periodic electric shocks to another where they could jump over a low wall to escape. Unlike other dogs, the ones moved from the other cage tended not to even try to find a way out.

You may have seen learned helplessness in people around you – people who scoff at the possibility of anything getting better. Learned helplessness is endemic in our society, and the source of much unhappiness. So what can you do in the face of realities that you don’t like and can’t change to keep from learning to be helpless?

Practicing Reframing

There are lots of sources about techniques that individuals can use to reframe personal thinking in more productive ways, such as Aaron Beck on cognitive therapy and Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte on resilience training. There have already been two articles on this subject in June: Senia Maymin’s APE method to get out of a bad mood and Nick Hall’s article about the ABC approach. So I’d like to focus on reframing as a group exercise, where people decide to turn the downward spiral around by working together on new ways to view shared reality. I have found that reframing is a skill that people in groups pick up pretty quickly once they’re challenged to try it.

What I’ve found works (informally – no empirical evaluation) is for the group to first clarify their instinctive negative reaction, “This is BAD because…” and then brainstorm for more empowering positive reactions, “This is GOOD because …”

For example, a group complains about turnover on the team with experienced people leaving and newcomers arriving. The instinctive reaction might be “This is BAD because it means more work for me.” The reframed reaction might be “This is GOOD because the new people are bringing fresh energy, new ideas, and optimism. Maybe the optimism will be contagious.” For another example, consider a tedious exacting chore that has to be done correctly as a condition of employment. The instinctive reaction might be “This is a booby trap where I might lose my job because of problems with the tools we use.” A reframed reaction might be “There might be an opportunity here for me to shine – if I can find a better way or build better tools.”

One of my favorite examples reflects a change of thinking around annual performance evaluations. The initial view was “This is BAD because we are being compared to each other, which is destructive to teamwork because if I help my peer, I might make him look better than I do. I work really hard and I am probably not going to get the credit or raise that I deserve. My manager isn’t strong enough to argue for a high evaluation for me.” All of these complaints may be true. Then the group reframed, not necessarily to find what was good about performance evaluations, but instead to find ways to be in control of their own responses by refocusing on what’s really important to each of them personally – money or position or family – and then taking action. Suggested actions included

Work with your supervisor to define a job that you actually WANT to do and ENJOY doing based on your strengths and skill set and then you will not mind the hard work

Ask for time and resources for education to build new skills. Make sure you and your supervisor agree on where growth is needed and how you are going to approach it.

Ask for job changes that give you a chance to collaborate with other groups to build your personal networks.

Find ways to be rewarded and recognized for helping others – as well as ways to acknowledge the help others give you. Many supervisors fail to see the many examples of collaboration that occur.

If you want to show your creativity, look for difficult problem areas and use creative ideas to turn them around

If position and/or money is your motivation, and you don’t mind the sacrifices it will take to get there, then work with your supervisor to focus on getting opportunities in your career path to get you where you want to be

This particular instance of reframing goes beyond finding more positive ways to think about reality. It illustrates the way people can accept that they cannot change the external reality, but they can affect their own internal reality.

These specific actions may not be useful for other professions, but perhaps there are other actions that work there, such as learning the “social political intelligence so critical to shaping our institutions” that Peter Minich describes.

Summary: Achieving Learned Optimism

Optimism can be learned, and it contributes to work performance and personal well-being. Luthans, Youseff, and Avolio (2007, pp. 99-100) describe the difference between optimistic and pessimistic employees in today’s rapidly changing work environments:

Optimistic and pessimistic employees react very differently to these turbulent times. Optimists are more likely to embrace the changes, see the opportunities the future holds, and focus on capitalizing on those opportunities…. Pessimists, on the other hand, will likely dwell on incidences of failure or poor performance and stunt their own growth opportunities as they continue to seek their lost structure and certainty in their work lives.

Learned Optimism (Seligman, 1991) contains a number of exercises for learning to dispute pessimistic thoughts. It would be interesting to experiment with these exercises in group settings.

6 Comments »

Kathryn,
You’ve done something really interesting in this article – you’ve taken a situation (performance reviews), and listed various reframing ways to think about it. It’s really clear and really simple – and that’s what I think is so interesting. (The simple and clear tone reminds me of Jen Hausmann’s article on the right fit, and introducing the 3:1 ratio to her workplace). I really, really, really love it when something can be both simple and effective. It’s my favorite way. THANK YOU!
Senia

p.s. This actually is incredible that we’re on the same wavelength – me with the APE method, Nick with ABCDE, and you with cognitive reframing and this specific situation. I’m enjoying this month!

Thanks! Senia. I thought it made a pretty good progression, from individual mood to group interpretation.

I received a note from a long-time friend (my high school senior year English teacher) on my thoughts:

I have just finished reading The Naked Brain and
it corroborates your … on getting together with a group to try to change work pessimism to more optimism. This is a survey of what brain imaging says about the brain–and one major finding is that the brain is social. For example, if you see someone eating something you like, the areas in your brain that go with eating light up. Kids do not
learn language from tapes and TV, but only from human beings.

[…] Attitude: This is classic reframing. Are there other ways to look at the situation that leave us with a greater sense of personal control and opportunity? In last month’s article, I included some examples of reframing that came out of my work experiences, and we’ve being doing some live reframing on this site. Schneider uses the term fuzzy meaning to represent uncertainty in interpretation in contrast to fuzzy knowledge which is uncertainty in fact. I think of the attitude pathway as dealing effectively with fuzzy meaning . We have interpretative latitude, so we can choose interpretations that put us in the best positions to move forward. […]

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